Girl Power? Investment Trends for Female Entrepreneurs on Shark Tank (US)

Final Project
Data Science 1 with R (STAT 301-1)

Author

Allison Kane

Published

December 5, 2023

Introduction

Overview of the EDA. What was the motivation for this analysis? What initial curiosities or research questions motivated you? Describe the data source(s) you will use to build a predictive model. If you are obtaining information from websites you should cite those in your References.

Data overview & quality

A concise high level overview of the dataset(s) being explored. Description of the dataset(s) that covers basics: size, number of observations, number, of variables, variable types, and discussion of any quality issues (especially missingness and how it may impact the analysis). Highlight any important data collection issues or concerns. If over-technical, but important, then place technical details in Appendix: technical info.

Demographics

Figure 1: Gender Ratios

Women are often underrepresented in positions of authority, especially as entrepreneurs. In Figure 1 Shark Tank (US) seasons 1-14, it is clear that women-led businesses are outnumbered by male-led businesses. Mixed gender entrepreneur teams are represented even less. This gender imbalance might limit viewers’ exposure to female entrepreneurs and hinder their acceptance of women in positions of power, especially in business.

Often, women find entering specific, male-dominated fields more difficult. Additionally, industries with greater representations of women are often viewed as less lucrative, less serious and less deserving of investment.

Figure 2: Businesses Represented

In Figure 2, the industries most represented include Food/Beverage, Fashion/Beauty, and Lifestyle/Home. Some of these businesses are typically associated with women, like Fashion/Beauty, but representation in leadership roles is rarely dominated by women.

Figure 3: Industries Represented with Female Entrepreneurs

In Figure 3, Industries with female entrepreneurs represented on shark tank (US) seasons 1-14 show that women are most involved in Food/Beverage, Fashion/Beauty, Children/Education and Lifestyle/Home industries. Three industries do not have any female-run businesses represented: Automotive, Electronics, Liquor/Alcohol.

Figure 4: Industry Leadership Gender Representation

Figure 4 indicates that only one industry on Shark Tank (US) has more female-led businesses represented than male or mixed team led businesses: children/education. All other industries have a greater representation of male entrepreneurs than female entrepeneurs and mixed teams. Representation of female entrepeneurs is better in Fashion/Beauty, Health/Wellness and Pet Products industries, but male-entrepeneurs are still represented more often. Representation of female entrepreneurs is the worst in the Automotive, Electronics and Liquor/Alcohol industries. In particular, Liquor/Alcohol does not have any female-led or mixed-team led businesses represented at all.

The bias in gender-representation in Shark Tank (US) could have additional effects, including how frequently deals are made for different genders, the quality of the deal, and how individual sharks behave towards different genders of entrepeneurs.

Conclusions

State conclusions or insights. Were you surprised by things you found or were they as expected? Why? This is a great place for future work, new research questions, and next steps.

References

Thirumani, S., Rehman, A.U., and Molagoda, J., 2023, Shark Tank US dataset, https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/thirumani/shark-tank-us-dataset

Appendix: technical info — if needed

A place to share complex and important technical steps that may highly impact explorations, but the details are too technical to share in main body of the report.

Appendix: extra explorations — if needed

Useful in cases where there are an over-abundance of explorations and they are not useful in the main body of the report or they are uninteresting, but still think readers should have access to them for reference.